Experts Database

Ayan Yasin Abdi, is a Ph.D.-fellow at the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University. She is a board member of Ph.D. Association of Roskilde University (PARU), and she teaches and publishes in the areas of diasporic cultures, ethnicity and minority studies, the welfare state, transnational ties, migration and mobility, post-migration movements, gender, globalization, decolonial studies, racialization, and postcolonialism. Email: ayan@ruc.dk

Caitlyn Yates is a PhD student in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. My research focuses on the journeys of migrants from the African and Asian continents who transit in and through Latin America. In particular, I focus on human security, transit migration, extra-continental migration, migrant smuggling, and borders in Latin America. Currently, I am a fellow in the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative (CAMPI) at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law and an affiliate of UBC’s Centre for Migration Studies. I hold a BA in Anthropology from Trinity University and a Master of Global Policy from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

My research is action-oriented, primarily informed by social and community psychology approaches. It addresses the socio-structural causes of injustice relating to climate change, racism, immigration, and the nexus between the three. Currently, my PhD research, through the University of Auckland, is exploring attitudes to and the implications of climate change-related migration in Aotearoa New Zealand,working alongside Tuvaluan and I-Kiribati diasporic communities.

Başak Yavcan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Turkey, where she heads an interdisciplinary graduate program on Migration Studies. She is also a Senior Researcher at the Hugo Observatory of Environment Migration and Politics, University of Liège. She holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, Department of Political Science, has conducted research at Michigan University’s Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, at New York University and at the Northwestern University Buffett Institute’s Keyman Modern Turkish Studies.

Yavçan's research focuses on inter-group relations and public opinion, in particular regarding refugee integration, impact of immigration attitudes on Euroscepticism, immigrant acculturation attitudes and structural and environmental drivers of migration. She has worked extensively on the integration of Syrian refugees in Turkey, with a particular focus on inter-group attitudes, employment, institutional trust, Islamic radicalization, effectiveness of local and national policies and interventions on promoting cohesion. Yavçan has conducted field research in various countries as part of national and international grant schemes, using both quantitative and qualitative methods including surveys, experiments, focus groups, in-depth interviews and content analyses and her resulting work has been published in a number of journals including Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Journal of Communication, Turkish Studies, books and policy reports for international institutions such as UNESCO, ICMPD, Care International, and GIZ.

Dr. Inci Öykü Yener-Roderburg is a full-time researcher at the Academy of International Affairs NRW and a lecturer at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics, University of Cologne.
Until recently, Dr. Yener-Roderburg was a postdoc/research associate at the Institute for Turkish Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, acted as an external collaborator for the ERC-funded project “Migration, transnationalism and social protection in (post-) crisis Europe”, CEDEM, University of Liège, Belgium, and contributed as a country expert for Germany in the NSW Government funded project “Building Democratic Resilience”, the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance (CDDGG), University of Canberra, Australia.
Dr Yener-Roderburg holds a PhD in Political Science (Cotutelle) from the University of Strasbourg and the University of Duisburg-Essen, and an MA from the Australian National University. Her research interests include external voting, transnational political engagement of migrants, citizenship and qualitative research methods. Dr Yener-Roderburg has published in high-impact academic journals and is frequently featured in the European media in particular.

In 2020, I have been awarded with the DCU School of Law and Government PhD scholarship under the supervision of Prof Federico Fabbrini. In particular, I am conducting research on the agreement concluded in 2016 between Turkey and the EU to stem the migration crisis and to evaluate this from the perspective of EU law and international human rights law including by analysing the growing case law of European and national courts. The research uses legal scholarship to analyse the legality of the agreement from the perspective of the authority of the EU to conclude it, but also resorts to political science literature on new intergovernmentalism to explain the dynamics of the conclusion of the agreement.

Deniz YETKİN AKER is an Associate Professor at Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Istanbul Beykent University. Before joining BU, she worked at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Tekirdağ Namık Kemal University. As an expert on migration issues in Turkey and globally, she has taught and researched at several institutions domestically. She received her BA in Philosphy from Bogazici University, an MA in Political Science from Sabancı University, and she gained her PhD in Political Science from Bilkent University. She has published extensively on international migration within Turkey and several regions in journals such as International Migration, Turkish Studies, and Migration Letters; and contributed in many edited volumes on related subjects. Deniz Yetkin Aker is fluent in English, intermediate in German and French, and conducts theoretical and empirical research. Her research interests are basically international migration, political participation, citizenship and social cohesion. She will be the founder and director of Istanbul Beykent University Migration and Diversity Research Center.